A History of Sweets in 50 Wrappers. Steve Berry

even beyond the grave.

      Love at first bite. Wall’s Dracula (1981), ultimately resurrected in 2013.

      Easter bon-bonnet. Cadbury’s Creme Egg (1971).

CREME EGG

      Though various fondant-filled eggs had been produced by Cadbury since 1923, it wasn’t until decimalisation that the Brummie confectioners finally cracked it with the consumer. That consummate assemblage of foil wrapper, chocolate shell, thick sugary albumen and all-important yolk centre debuted amid precious little fanfare. (Readers in Scotland had their own chocolate-filled egg.)

      A short TV spot encouraging the customary Jennings-like schoolchildren to overwhelm shopkeepers with demands for ‘6,000 Creme Eggs, please’ failed to take into account the limited means of the audience. But the marketers persisted and eventually hatched a television campaign based around a reworking of Cole Porter’s genteel and only slightly racist song, ‘Let’s Do It’, which saw all manner of shy debutantes, maiden aunts and girls in France falling for the irresistible charms of the ovoid snack. Impressionable kids scrambled to empty their piggy banks and helped boost sales from around 50 million in the mid-’70s to nearly 200 million by the early ’80s.

      In 1984 Cadbury’s creative agency, Triangle, no doubt spurred on by the success of Masquerade, Kit Williams’s kids’ book, conceived an unashamedly derivative national treasure hunt for twelve golden eggs. Caskets were buried in far-flung corners of the countryside (though one, discovered accidentally, nearly blew the lid off the whole enterprise) and Creme Egg fans were invited to send off for, and solve, the Conundrum. Within three months, Cadbury had to call a press conference to halt overzealous punters digging up stone circles, hill forts and Christian burial sites in search of the £10,000 (‘Garrards certified retail value’) eggs. As far as slogans go, ‘Stop looking on or around Pendle Hill and the Wrekin’ is about as off-brand as you can get.

      Foiled again? Cadbury makes it difficult for treasure hunters to poach themselves a golden egg.

      Scotch egg. Cadbury’s Border Creme Egg (1970) eschews sausage and breadcrumbs in favour of a chocolate fondant centre.

      However, all this hedge-hopping hadn’t gone unnoticed and Cadbury’s rivals soon poached the egg idea for their own retail lines. Rowntree introduced both the Toffee Mallow and Fresh Minty Egg (in 1982), and Terry’s hit back with the Nutcracker (ostensibly the same shape, only wrinkled, filled with caramel and nuts), then, in 1988, the ill-advised ‘indulgent novelty’ that was the Pyramint. Aimed at an older market, and fabulously advertised by the voice-artist dream-team of Leslie Phillips and Kenneth Williams, both hamming it up for all they were worth with an Egyptian mummy, it was a massive flop.

      Too large, too unwieldy and too messy to eat, Pyramint barely survived three years before being resurrected in a four-segment bar format and then quietly interred for a million years. The Creme Egg, however, continued to grow (not literally, it has genuinely always been the same size). In 1986 the question ‘How do you eat yours?’ was raised, backed by an in-store promotion inviting shoppers to collect fifteen wrappers and send in for a free ‘computer-produced personality analysis’. (RESULT: YOU ARE BEREFT OF LOVE AND FILL THE ACHING HOLE THAT REMAINS WITH CHOCOLATE.) Then, in 1992, Cadbury’s very own Easter Bunny laid her first Caramel Egg (again, not literally; that would be the weirdest cartoon ever). The nest, as they say, is history.

      The yolk’s on you. Cadbury’s Easter catalogue leads with a ‘cracking’ pun for 1986.

      Land of milk (chocolate) and honey (comb). Cadbury’s Crunchie (1929) is foiled again.

CRUNCHIE

      Honeycomb, cinder toffee, call it what you will, it’s as old as the hills. It’s easy to make: get some sugar and corn syrup extremely bloody hot, bung in some baking powder, stand well back, and there you have it. Or rather, there you have irregular lumps of it. It’s how you tame the fragile honeycomb into a sleek polyhedron that’s the tricky part.

      Aussie manufacturer Hoadley’s started squaring the brittle in 1918 with the Violet Crumble. The down-under spies at Fry’s reported this back to their Keynsham HQ, and a race was on to replicate it. Early attempts were unreliable, Fry’s having to employ women specially to solder snapped bars back together with bunsen burners, but eventually a nifty system of cutting the slabs with a high-pressure jet of oil solved the problem. Add a distinctive heavy foil wrapper to stop the honeycomb going soft, and it’s Crunchie ahoy.

      It was slow to take off, despite some early product placement in horsey kids’ book National Velvet, though after the Second World War it was popular enough for Rowntree to float a short-lived rival, Cracknel Block. The ’60s saw it really embed into the national psyche – by ’68 Observer hacks were writing ‘that’s the way the Crunchie crumbles’ when casting about for a with-it-sounding cliché.

      By the ’80s it was everywhere, repackaged in shiny gold and sponsoring Five Star and Billy Ocean. Though what really got it noticed was a strange daily ad campaign in 1987, wherein an automatic wall-calendar sombrely recorded the changing days of the week, as a rather glum voice mused, ‘Not long till Friday.’ Come the weekend, this low-key teaser was revealed as the beginning of the Thank Crunchie It’s Friday campaign, which gave rise to two decades of frenetic fun in the name of burnt sugar. Modern advertising, you see, all very clever. And slightly more appropriate than associating children’s chocolate with the man who sang ‘Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car’.

      Long, cool and bubbly. TV’s‘ ‘champagne bar’ campaign, circa 1978.

      Cadbury’s make with the ‘miles of chewy toffee.’ Curly Wurly (1970).

CURLY WURLY

      Cadbury entered the 1970s in a reflective mood. Mars was the problem. Mars’s big-hitters – filled bars in the Marathon, Mars or Milky Way mould – were cleaning up, while Cadbury’s sedate blocks were primarily successful with only the older, and significantly less impulsive, customer. No one bought and scoffed three bars of Fruit ‘n’ Nut in an afternoon break. (Or at least, if they did, they kept quiet about it.) Cadbury already had the Crunchie under Fry’s imprimatur, but recent innovations had met with varied results. Their best shot was the Aztec, but even that was losing to the celestially named behemoths from Slough. Cloning Mars products was a fool’s errand, so Cadbury’s technicians started thinking outside the bar. One outlandish design, a braided lattice of three caramel laces, seemed to fit the bill. A pleasingly wacky shape inside, and it dwarfed its rivals on the shelves by dint of sheer scale: as Malcolm Tucker reminisced in The Thick of It, ‘the size of a small ladder’.

      This was the confectioner’s